A Look Back at Super Bowl XXIV (49ers 55, Broncos 10), the First in New Orleans

This is the most dominant 49ers’ Super Bowl win; a good precedent for the team to follow in the 2013 Super Bowl. Here are parts of two articles covering the thrashing of the Broncos.
Mark Blaudschun of the Boston Globe wrote:

It was the most one-sided victory in Super Bowl history, as the 49ers dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on a championship season with a 55-10 romp over the Denver Broncos yesterday at the Superdome.

All Montana did was complete 22 of 29 passes for 297 yards and throw a Super Bowl-record five touchdown passes in placing himself on the same plateau as former Pittsburgh Steeler Terry Bradshaw as the only QBs to win four Super Bowls. Montana also became the Super Bowl’s first three-time Most Valuable Player award winner.

All the 49ers did was become the first team since the Steelers in 1978 and ’79 to repeat as NFL champs, tie the Steelers as the only team to win four Super Bowls and breeze through this year’s playoffs by outscoring the Minnesota Vikings, Los Angeles Rams and Broncos, 126-26.

“If we can play any better than this, I hope to see it next year,” said Montana, who threw for three of his five TDs in the first half as the 49ers rolled to a 27-3 lead.

Two of those throws were to Jerry Rice, who finished with seven catches for 148 yards and three scores.

“We are the best,” said Rice, who will not receive any argument there. Certainly, no one among the Superdome crowd of 72,919 was about to dispute it.

The 49ers established themselves quickly, scoring on their first drive as Montana completed a 66-yard, 10-play march by zipping a 20-yarder to Rice.

That drive set the tempo of the game. “We knew we could control this game, dominate it,” said offensive tackle Bubba Paris. That they did.

Denver scored a token field goal following Montana’s first touchdown pass, but all that did was make the 49ers more determined to gain control. . . . For Denver, losers in three of the last four Super Bowls, frustration was evident in every phase of its game. The Broncos couldn’t stop Montana or Rice. Nor could they mount any kind of offense.

Most of the burden fell on the shoulders of Denver quarterback John Elway. Elway, who had one of the best days of his career in the Broncos’ 37-21 AFC championship victory over the Browns two weeks ago, had one of his worst against the 49ers.

“The idea was to keep Elway contained, make him run up the middle,” said 49ers free safety Ronnie Lott.

The strategy worked perfectly. Elway connected on only 10 of 26 passes for 108 yards. He was sacked four times and was intercepted twice.

Both interceptions came in the third quarter and both were almost instantly turned into scoring strikes by Montana.

Trailing by so much at the half, Denver had little choice but to air it out. The only problem was that Elway had no place to throw. The first interception, by linebacker Michael Walter, gave the 49ers a first down at the Bronco 24.

Montana wasted little time, finding Rice on a post pattern for 28 yards and the TD.

Elway came out and tried again. This time strong safety Chet Brooks picked off the attempt and rumbled to the Denver 37. Two plays later, Montana went to John Taylor over the middle and he worked his way into the end zone.

With more than nine minutes left in the third quarter, San Francisco had a 41-3 lead and was looking like the team of the century instead of the decade.

“There’s not much you can say,” said Broncos coach Dan Reeves. “We made a lot of experts who said that we didn’t deserve to be on the same field with the 49ers look good.”

“There’s not a whole lot you can say about something like this,” said Reeves. “We just made a whole lot of mistakes and you can’t do that against a team like the 49ers.”

The 49ers did make a few mistakes. Kicker Mike Cofer missed an extra point on their second touchdown, which made it 13-3. And the defense suffered a lapse after it was 41-3, allowing the Broncos to score their only touchdown on a 3-yard run by Elway. But that did little to ease the Broncos’ pain. Nor did it do much to hide the obvious. The 49ers were far superior.

“I don’t know if anyone in the NFL is on their level right now,” said Reeves.

And a few lines from an article by Leonard Shapiro of the Washington Post:

Coach Dan Reeves probably put it best when he said, “They’re playing at a level that no team in the NFL can match right now.

“I’m proud of this team, we’ve come a long way to get here. I’m disappointed; there are a lot of people we let down. We made a lot of experts look real smart. Life is cruel . . . I’m not angry. It’s one of those deals in life you know will happen but you just hope it doesn’t happen to you. Life is tough.”

And so were the 49ers. The Broncos came into the game hoping to keep San Francisco off the field with ball-control offense, and defensively were hoping to avoid yielding big plays. Instead it was just the opposite.

No one was quite prepared to single out a turning point in a 55-10 game, but most of the Broncos felt that Bobby Humphrey’s fumble at midfield with his team trailing by 7-3 but moving nicely in the first quarter changed the tone of the game. The 49ers went on to score a touchdown and take a 13-3 lead, and the Broncos were facing the beginning of the end.

“I really don’t know exactly what happened,” Humphrey said. “The ball hit my leg and it popped up and then I didn’t know where the ball went.”

“When we fumbled, we were moving the ball,” said quarterback John Elway. “Then they took it in and scored, and that hurt us. . . . I’m not happy with the way I played. We had to answer the bell when they did score, and we couldn’t. When {Joe} Montana got going, we couldn’t do it.”

Broncos defensive coordinator Wade Phillips said that his defense did not react well when the 49ers began to pile up the points early.

“Once or twice we might have gone into a panic but it wasn’t over something we hadn’t seen,” he said. “But look at their game films. They didn’t make mistakes against the Rams or the Vikings {in their previous playoff games} and they didn’t do it today. You’d think they won’t do the same thing against us, but they did.
“Once we got in trouble, we tried to press and do things we shouldn’t have done. Youthful mistakes. We didn’t make mistakes during the season, but we sure did today.”

Reeves said he tried to convince his team at halftime that they were still in the game. “You tell them that anything can happen, that you have to play hard. If we could have done something right away {in the third quarter}, you never know.”

The message did no good. Elway’s first pass of the second half was intercepted, and one play later Montana found Jerry Rice for a 28-yard touchdown pass and a 34-3 lead. On his third throw of the half, Elway was picked off again, and two plays later it was Montana to John Taylor for 35 yards and a touchdown, making it 49ers 41, Denver 3. End of story.

Like everyone else, the Broncos were in awe of Montana.

“I was on the sideline where I wasn’t enjoying it,” Reeves said. “I mean, what can you say? We did a very poor job of getting any pressure on him. . . . He’s the key. Even when you rush him, he’s a great quarterback who makes great throws. If you give him all day, it’s impossible. Nobody is going to cover Rice, Taylor, Craig and Rathman all day. We couldn’t get enough pressure on him to make him hurry his throws.”

Said Kragen: “Give Joe a lot of credit and his receivers credit. They caught a lot of balls and he threw a lot of balls. They are virtually unstoppable. They throw it short, they throw it long. You think you can put together a game plan to stop them, but nobody’s done it yet. They just keep making the plays and making the plays.”